Trump to hold rally in Tulsa – what could possibly go wrong?

There is nothing more that Trump loves than holding rallies and one can see why. A narcissist loves to be the center of attention of an adoring crowd who cheer his inanities and treat his schoolyard taunts and insults as if they were witticisms worthy of an Oscar Wilde. The restriction on large gatherings must have chafed him considerably and while he tried to hijack the daily pandemic briefing as a substitute for rallies, that was clearly not enough. So it is no surprise that he planning to hold rallies again.
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Review: Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich (2020)

I watched this four-part mini-series about Jeffrey Epstein. I thought that I knew the Epstein story pretty well but this series was an eye-opener mainly because it gave a voice to the many young girls who were abused and trafficked by Epstein. The number of such girls was astounding, way beyond what I had thought. Their description of how he groomed them and then took advantage of them were so disgusting that at the end of each one-hour episode, I actually felt dirty and had to watch some other show just to partially cleanse my mind.
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Terry Crews talks about being black in the NFL

Terry Crews was a professional football player in the NFL from 1991 to 1997 and since then has made a successful transition to acting, showing himself to have real comedy chops. I have only seen him on the comedy show Brooklyn Nine-Nine where he makes fun of his own muscular appearance. He is a real scene-stealer.

He talks with Seth Meyers about what it was like to be a black football player and how the coaches and trainers treated them differently from the white players. He describes the indignities he faced and a harrowing incident where, while he was still a high profile football player playing for Los Angeles, he was stopped while driving in California and police officers from two squad cars came to him with their guns pointed at his head.

He says that he welcomes the NFL’s change in stance on players kneeling in protests but that he never expected them to do it. He also says that the NFL should bring back Colin Kaepernick if they are to really show their sincerity.

Mitt Romney and his father

I wrote before how some Republicans are now starting to distance themselves from Donald Trump following his disgraceful response to the protests and demonstrations following the murder of George Floyd. I said that while we should welcome their defections, we should never let them forget their complicity in creating the kind of Republican party that enabled Trump to win the presidency, and have continued to support him on his rampage against basic norms and decency.
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Paula Jean Swearengin wins Democratic primary for WV senate seat

On Tuesday there were primary elections in several states and much media attention has rightly focused on the fiasco in Georgia where once again voters in De Kalb and Fulton counties, the latter where the city of Atlanta is, and where both have large black populations, faced lines that lasted for many hours to vote, a further example of how the Republican-controlled state government tries to suppress black votes by making it much harder for them than for white districts, by having far too few polling stations, malfunctioning equipment, and insufficient and inadequately trained poll workers.

But I want to focus on one good result that happened in a different state.
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Seth Meyers on Trump and the police reaction to the protests

He says that the police are lashing out violently because the protests have had an impact. More and more people are coming out for the demonstrations and public opinion is overwhelmingly in favor of the protestors.

He also emphasizes that the rising stock market reveals what many of us have been saying for years, that the stock market has no relationship to the lives of most people but is just something that measures the how well the wealthy are doing. And it appears that they are doing very well indeed despite the pandemic and the turmoil.

The pandemic may be the death of the coal industry

While the economy struggles to recover from the pandemic, an unexpected casualty that may not survive is the coal industry.

The global coal industry will “never recover” from the Covid-19 pandemic, industry observers predict, because the crisis has proved renewable energy is cheaper for consumers and a safer bet for investors.

A long-term shift away from dirty fossil fuels has accelerated during the lockdown, bringing forward power plant closures in several countries and providing new evidence that humanity’s coal use may finally have peaked after more than 200 years.
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The same old media misinformation story repeated in Bolivia

The pattern should be familiar to any observer of the US media. When the US government wants to discredit the leader of a nation that it dos not like, it trumps up some charge, gets some ostensibly neutral party (that is often covertly funded by the CIA or other US government agency) to support the charge, and much of the mainstream US media obediently snaps into line and parrots the charge, providing cover for those who want to overthrow that country’s leader. Then long after the overthrow has occurred, the US media that led the charge quietly acknowledge that the basis on which they called for the overthrow was wrong. But the damage has been done.
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Powerful show on police brutality

On Sunday’s episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver devoted the entire show to the need for police reform in the US and what the options are. It is an excellent show about what needs to be done to deal with the toxic police culture in the US that has led to so much brutality. One of the things he focuses on is the very negative role played by police unions.

I am really glad that so many white, Hispanic, and Asian groups have identified with and joined in the protests. That is a sign of hope because we need a broad multi-racial and multi-ethnic and multi-generational coalition to get real change.
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Video analysis of what happened before Trump’s photo op

One of the low but illustrative points during the last week was the massive show of force by the various branches of the US security forces, including the military, in Washington DC to clear demonstrators out of Lafayette Square just across from the White House. And for what? Just to enable Trump to walk a couple of blocks and stand in front of a church and wave a Bible. What it really showed was the level of militarization of US law enforcement as it acted like an army in occupied territory.
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